Marian Wright Edelman Quotes - Page 3

There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

Never work just for money or for power. They won't save your soul or help you sleep at night.

Dr. King used to say, 'I was sitting in the back of the bus, but my mind was always up front.' Don't let anybody tell you that you can't do it. You aim high and you work very hard and now I think it's clear that you can be anything you want to.

If we think we have ours and don't owe any time or money or effort to help those left behind, then we are a part of the problem rather than the solution to the fraying social fabric that threatens all Americans and the very dream that is America.

Be grateful for good breaks and kind favors but don't count on them.

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.

I feel very lucky to have grown up having interaction with adults who were making change but who were far from perfect beings. That feeling of not being paralyzed by your incredible inadequacy as a human being, which I feel every day, is a part of the legacy that I've gotten from so many of the adult elders.

In every seed of good there is always a piece of bad.

We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.

Whoever said anybody has a right to give up?

Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for their children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.

It is [children] who are God's presence, promise and hope for mankind.

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

No one, Eleanor Roosevelt said, can make you feel inferior without your consent. Never give it.

You can achieve much in life if you don't mind doing the work and giving someone else the credit.

In trying to make a big difference, don't ignore the small daily differences we can make.

You just do it one step at a time.

The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.

Semi-automatic weapons have no socially redeeming purpose.

So much of America's tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people's children--as if justice were divisible.

Homeless shelters, child hunger, and child suffering have become normalized in the richest nation on earth. It's time to reset our moral compass and redefine how we measure success.

If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

So often we are depressed by what remains to be done and forget to be thankful for all that has been done.